A friend has said about me: “Joni is either the most serious fun person I know, or the most fun serious person I know.” I'm both humbled and proud to be seen in this light. Serious things can be joyful, and joy can be a serious commitment. I'm dedicated to joy and the flourishing of souls.

I’m a spiritual director, educator, facilitator, writer, and lifelong learner. At the heart of my work is a fascination with human flourishing, or eudaimonia, one of my favorite words. It’s the lifelong business of becoming more fully ourselves and living well from that place.

I’m especially interested in what happens when we slow down enough to notice: ourselves, one another, the world around us, and the movement of the Divine within it all. Slowing down creates room for curiosity, for discernment, and for possibilities we might miss when we rush toward certainty.

I first encountered these words from Rainer Maria Rilke when I was nineteen:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

I’ve put that passage in my planner ever since. It’s more than a favorite quotation. It has become both a practice and a philosophy: live the questions.

My approach is relational, curious, and practical. Awareness creates freedom. When we become less governed by urgency, fear, expectation, and reactivity, we become more able to respond from who we are, what we value, and what we consciously choose. That changes how we relate, how we lead, and how we participate in community.

Spiritual direction has been one of the great homes for this work for me. So have classrooms, workshops, retreats, boardrooms, hospital rooms, churches, and theatres. I’m fascinated by the ways human beings make meaning, find connection, wrestle with what matters, and become more fully alive.

I received my training in spiritual direction at Seminary of the Southwest, where I earned a Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation. My work over the years has included spiritual direction, healthcare chaplaincy, adult spiritual formation, leadership education, program development, teaching, and creating communities where people can learn and practice together.

And then there are all the other things.

Creativity has always been part of my spiritual vocabulary. Theatre and photography have been lifelong vocations for me; I’ve spent much of my life acting, directing, and working as a professional photographer. I also write, garden, cook, and dabble in aquascaping—with varying degrees of success.

I love ideas, people, community, spirituality, The X-Files, and a good conversation that goes somewhere nobody expected.

I also insist on the Oxford comma.

I live just outside Austin, Texas, with my wonderful wife Tammy (The Optimistic Meditator) Edgar the Dog, and several freshwater fish who are quite pretty but contribute very little to the household.

Underneath all of this is a pretty simple desire: to create spaces where people can become more aware, more connected, more free, and more fully alive, and then carry that way of being into the lives, relationships, and communities they touch.

That feels like work worth doing. Let's have some fun while we're doing it.